I want a Scanner What Should I Choose

If you have boxes and boxes of slides or negatives in the loft (and let’s be honest who doesn’t if they are photographers of a certain age), then you may want to get them digitized.

Now, it is a labour of love, no doubt about it, but what price years and years of enjoyment at the touch of a button. No more searching for a particular print in a certain album or a tiny slide in a box of hundreds, just scan it, file it into a computer and then find it in minutes.

There are hundreds of scanners to choose from and really the first thing to consider is if you want to scan flat art work (prints, paper etc), slides or negatives, or indeed all three. Flat bed scanners are very versatile and come with slide and negative carriers, but are usually a little bit more expensive. The standard film scanners will generally scan 35mm negatives, either in strips or individually and slides, either mounted in the actual slide or just as an individual image. The holders for slide come in various different materials, the oldest being cardboard and then plastic and although they can be difficult to remove from their mounts, sometimes it pays to take that extra time.

Some scanners have cleaning software incorporated in them, which is great if you have dusty or old pictures that require a bit of ‘tidying up’, but you can also scan the image and then spend time afterwards cleaning them up on a software like Photoshop, it just depends if you want to store them, or print them out.

Cheaper scanners will take up to 30seconds a scan, which doesn’t sound a long time, but if you have loads to do, then you can soon lose the will to live. Some of the more expensive scanners have screen attached, which means you can keep tabs on where you are in the scanning process and also decide if you want to ditch a few, although in my experience, it’s impossible to throw away any type of image, even if I have four exactly the same, because you never know ............. ???

Lastly, scanners can scan direct to your hardware, or straight onto a card. The jury is still out for me, because it depends what you are doing with the scans once they are done, but if you want to play around with them, then the computer, tablet, or laptop is best.